Two For the Road (1967) © Twentieth Century Fox
We cannot live solely in/for our memories. Agnès Varda has always lived for the today. Memories are akin to rip tides. De fois. Her latest docu/reality comedy is Faces Places (Visages Villages) in collaboration with photographer/muralist JR. It is a beautiful film. A mostly happy film. Never a whiff of insincerity or condescension in taking enormous format B/W photos of local workers on the France road trip and pasting them advertising large upon ruins, ship containers, a fallen block of Nazi concrete upon the sand. Agnès Varda has the last laugh and the last cry as is befitting. There is politics d'alors enduring politics of humanity not rhetoric or coercion. See the film and be re-born!
Another legend, 'another suitcase, another hall'..never for Agnès and hopefully never for Lois Smith, that actress' eyes utterly transfixing us into the big screen. Michael Almereyda's screen adaption of Jordan Harrison's stage play Marjorie Prime must be seen in the cinema. Great cinema is about great presences inhabiting that huge strange rectangular/square space. Godard was no exception but he totally knew what a playground for an artist it could totally be. The playground of knowledge. Of re-birth.
Almereyda's camera is ever so subtle. Perhaps not so so inventive but then do we ever need that when there is always his eye of love? That is the invention. One inevitably thinks of the stage as locked and ever untranslatable to the screen. It is never so true for Marjorie Prime where memory is our key. Memory of the lived experience. Perhaps the film is a little bit difficult to 'buy into' if you never embrace or know the premise. Holographic projections (2050) that are there to soothe bereaved seniors and update with human info.
A totally absorbing ride and one you just can't replicate on even a large plasma screen.
How much does she have to forget before she’s not your mom anymore?
Thomas Stuth's latest work is also a stage set he found by researching NASA research locations. Who would have thought such 'mechanics' so mesmerizing? Exhilarating? A weird playfulness here back to Jules Verne. Where's not to have fun? There's no Johnny Depp and Pirates here. This is echt! Itinerant elves 'twooting' intrigued! Struth's dead animals are very sad. Not quite as moving, perhaps, as a Hamptons artist who exhibited at Spring Break (2016?) a year so ago and fired porcelain of dead animals she found outside her studio and created cakes of them. [Will try googling my own site and find her name..]
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